Conditioning Away Prejudicial Attitudes in Children

Abstract
The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether or not certain attitudes could be modified through classical conditioning. It was hypothesized that evaluations of Vietnamese and Afro-Americans would become more favorable after slides of each were paired with the presentation of positively evaluated words. Evaluations were made through the use of a semantic differential-type attitude scale (Osgood, 1952). Analysis of covariance demonstrated a significant increase in favorable evaluations of the Vietnamese only. The reason the evaluations of Afro-Americans did not demonstrate a similar change may have been due to the fact that Euro-American children's attitudes of Afro-Americans were too psychologically significant an issue to be modified by a single session of conditioning trials.

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